#27 — Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975) What does it say about the difference between European cinema, I wonder, that there’s such a pronounced fundamental difference between the two directors, roughly contemporaries, from each respective region that are best suited to having … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Seven
These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. Coldplay was already a significant band on the pop culture firmament when they released their fourth studio album, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, in the summer of 2008, in part because they had spent years signalling with all their collective being that they were prepared to be the next iteration of U2. What’s more, they were clearly ready to … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Violet Hill” and “Lost!”
Just over twenty-five years into their existence as Pixar and over fifteen years since they shifted the foundations of film with Toy Story, the computer animation studio that can make as much of a claim towards auteurship as any major … Continue reading I walked away from everyone I know, I looked around and thought, This must be what it’s like to be alone
26. The Living End, Roll On In tracking through the top college albums of 2001, I’ve spent a lot of words–an embarrassing amount of them, perhaps–detailing how poorly informed I was about many artists before personally beginning the rediscovery process … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 26 and 25
I had a few contributions up at Spectrum Culture this week, including one more than I originally anticipated. The first thing that posted was a review of the new album from Lemonade, which I actually forgot landed in my iTunes because I was supposed to write about it. So while I’ve been listening to it a fair amount since I got it, I hadn’t been thinking about what to say about it until the official deadline crossed my inbox. I think I pulled it together fine, but it was a little more of a scramble than it needed to be. … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I was never all that adept at following my favorite music performers as they moved from band to band. This was in part because I became a music a fan at the time when there were still really only three steps in a music career: 1. be part of a band, 2. have a solo career and 3. realize you’re too old to be doing that crazy rock ‘n’ roll thing any more. And that unofficial though seemingly mandatory retirement age was actually pretty young. When rock musicians persisted into their forties or, egad, fifties, they were still viewed somewhat … Continue reading One for Friday: Luna, “Cindy Tastes of Barbecue”
#28 — Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972) As always, I come to Ingmar Bergman as a wary traveler, an interloper into a cinematic world of abstract artistry that I’m not quite confident I’ll ever fully grasp. The legendary Swedish director, as much as anyone who ever stood on a movie set and told the cameraman where to point his machinery, comes at his films with a devotion to mood, deeply developed emotional truth and finding the profundity in that which is withheld. There are mysteries between the lines of his visual poetry and that is where the meaning lies. … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Eight
As I mentioned at the start of this project, the original impetus came from a Facebook meme that challenged me to name ten personally influential authors as quick as could, tapping into the literary stream of consciousness that flows through … Continue reading My Writers: Anne Tyler
The Quiet American (Phillip Noyce, 2002). Occasionally there will be a movie that adheres to a classic narrative structure that is also stolid, humorless and painfully dull that a small but vocal bundle of critics will tout as a dwindling example of cinematic material created for adults. I get that full-time critics were spending the end of 2002 gritting their teeth and covering their eyes while watching supposed comedies and franchise-killing sequels, but they still needed to grade on a helluva curve to find nice things to say about this dire adaptation of the Graham Greene novel. Michael Caine received … Continue reading Brooks, Hansen-Løve, Noyce, Polanski, Teshigahara
#29 — Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974) Like a lot of people who devote way too much mental energy to considering the best and worst of cinema, I have a distinct and enduring admiration for those filmmakers who artfully explore … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Nine
